In recent years, the types and quantity of media content available to consumers has expanded dramatically. Not too long ago, the media content available to many consumers at a given time might have included live performances or athletic events at perhaps a few venues, audio programming delivered via several radio stations and television programming delivered via a few channels. Today, live performances and athletic events have been increased in many areas and many choices are available via radio and television. In the latter regard, it is no longer uncommon to have access to hundreds of television channels. In addition, the internet increasingly competes for the attention of consumers with seemingly unlimited content options.
Without question, this explosion in media content has been driven, to some extent, by consumer demand and consumers have benefited greatly from the increased entertainment and other information opportunities. However, the shear quantity of choices has also created some frustration. In particular, many consumers now find it difficult and unacceptably time consuming to keep track of the available choices and conventional guides are sometimes of little assistance. For example, conventional TV guides have been expanded in many cases to cover the many choices available via cable or a satellite dish. However, such guides can be difficult to use, especially when they attempt to cover cable choices that vary from area to area or when they attempt to cover all programming for hundreds of channels.
As a result, some consumers have been reduced to so-called “channel surfing” in an attempt to manually survey the available options or have effectively given up on the idea of identifying the most interesting available option by adopting the habit of regularly returning to only a small number of channels. Even if one could become proficient in using conventional television guides and devoted the time necessary to select from all available options, only one medium would be mastered and the challenge of keeping track of other media would remain.